The study explores how enterprises are responding to the opportunities and risks introduced by new technologies.This year, we surveyed over 1,200 IT and business decision makers to determine why, when, and how their organizations adopt four pivotal emerging technologies – mobile, analytics, cloud and social business technologies – that are rapidly reshaping how enterprises operate.

Are you in the lead, or is your organization falling behind? You can use the adoption and investment statistics we discovered to help you assess where your organizationstands:

Business Analytics and Mobile Computing are already quite mainstream, with over 50% of respondents deploying.Cloud Computing and Social Business represent a coming wave, with 40% either already piloting the technologies, or planning to adopt them within two years.Moreover, planned investment levels in the four technologies over the next two years indicate that all are moving full steam ahead: 55% or more of respondents plan to increase investment in Mobile, Cloud, and Business Analytics, and 43% plan to increase their investment in Social Business. You can click on the following infographic to take a deeper dive:

Despite the foothold of these technologies and the enthusiastic investment landscape, the report cites critical IT skill gaps that threaten to slam on the brakes just as organizations are hoping to leverage these technologies for their strategic advantage:

Across all four technology areas, only roughly 1 in 10 companies report having all the skills they need to be successful, and one-quarter of respondents report major skill gaps.

We also surveyed about 700 educators and students about these technology areas, and according to their responses, the skill gap is poised to get even worse:

About one-half of academic respondents report major gaps in their institution’s ability to meet the needs of the IT workforce.

Security also continues to be a major concern. In fact, Security is rated as the #1 barrier to adoption for mobile, cloud and social business, and the #2 barrier to adoption for business analytics.

What can you learn from those making the most progress applying these technologies for strategic advantage?

We asked respondents to rate the four emerging technologies’ importance to their businesses and also to rate their enterprises’ pace of adoption relative to competitors. We identified an elite group of Pacesetters who are forging ahead faster than others – despite the adoption hurdles – and who are using emerging technologies in more strategic ways.

If you want to get your organization onto the technology fast track (or keep it there), there are a number of interesting lessons you can take from the Pacesetters. We found that Pacesetters are more likely to exhibit three distinguishing traits that help them capitalize on the potential of mobile, analytics, cloud and social technologies. They are:

More market-driven

More analytical

More experimental

So, how are Pacesetters managing to stay ahead of the competition? As it turns out, they’re very experimental in their approach to developing IT skills. Rather than wait until there’s clear business demand for new skills, Pacesetters start building skills ahead of time: they are nine times more likely to experiment with technologies that don’t yet have a clear business application, and twice as likely to proactively develop skills to meet anticipated needs.

To learn more about the study results and how you can follow the pacesetters’ lead in technology adoption, you can check out the complete IBM 2012 Tech Trends report and a variety of other resources.

Don't miss the paper's list of concrete recommendations for becoming Pacesetters. We invite you to join in the discussion and let us know what you think about the study and its recommendations!